Quote:
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Originally Posted by Stanley Fish
I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake. The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
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Those of you who have never experienced this sort of thing might not realize the kinds of things he has gone through in his entire life and those incidents probably shaped the way he reacted.
But I will say he was wrong in being overly confrontational with the police and I think the officer genuinely should not be needlessly blamed for this. He is not a racist, he was merely confronting someone who was not cooperative and displaying agressive behavior. Nobody is right or wrong in this case, it's just a bad situation which gets people talking about many of these latent issues that have built up over years of racial tensions in America.
If you remember, I posted a few months ago about an African-American co-worker who felt she was racially profiled or abused by a transit officer. She has actually gone back to the US now because of that experience has left a bad taste of Calgary in her mouth (in addition to seeing those Klan demonstrations awhile back as wel). For those who are wondering, they did goto mediation and the transit cop was disciplined for his actions which they ruled were out of line.